"Our market-based organizations need reliable outcomes data to help them identify opportunities for improvement," said Margaret Gavigan, vice president of clinical operations for Catholic Health Initiatives. "The Outcome Report provides individual hospital results and benchmarks, including 100 Top Hospitals and Catholic Health Initiatives peer group comparisons."

The Outcome Report focuses on four of seven measures used in Solucient’s 100 Top Hospitals report: complications, mortality, length of stay and charges. The data is risk adjusted to allow for variances in the severity of patient illness. "A major benefit of having patient-level data is that we can turn it into information our hospitals can use to focus on specific service lines or DRGs that demonstrate opportunity," said Jeff Kalicki, clinical analyst for Catholic Health Initiatives.

The Outcome Reports were developed to target opportunities to improve clinical outcomes and to demonstrate cost savings that can be achieved through clinical quality improvements. For example, the analysis of system-wide data shows that performance improvement in the area of complications could save more than $60 million per year across Catholic Health Initiatives.

Outcome Reports have been distributed to market-based chief executive officers, and meetings or conference calls to review the results with market-based leadership teams have already taken place or are being arranged. Second generation Outcome Reports, which include the most recent Medicare data available to provide a two-year trend analysis, are currently being completed. In addition, analyses of specific service lines are under development. For more information, contact Margaret Gavigan at 610/358-4525 or margaretgavigan@chi-east.org.